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Extract:

Report - Investigate and discuss the evolution of Business Intelligence solutions since 1990 (3,000 word report)

Introduction

This report will evaluate the continuous development ofbusiness intelligence (BI) solutions since 1990. It will cover how BI has evolved briefly in the past and then moving into depth to the present day and discuss the current issues surrounding BI solutions. This report will also look into evolution of data warehousing and discuss briefly how the terms "data mart", "data mining" and "data webhouse" were born. (Appendix 2 defines these terms). Then, the lessons learnt from current BI trends and issues will be discussed. Finally, this report outlooks the BI trends and ends with a short summary.

BI was originally known as decision support system and the term BI was introduced around the early 1980s. Despite decades since its emergence, BI still carries the same main objective: to facilitate better decision making for users. Normally, BI solutions are used by decision support employees and knowledge workers.

As businesses continue to grow, the amount of data being processed increases. Ortiz (2002) claims that the "…primary driving force for BI improvements has been the growing torrent of business data, which is increasingly difficult to analyze quickly and thoroughly". The need for a compatible BI system to manage the massive amount of data has become so obvious that BI solutions have evolved dramatically since 1990.

As such, leading BI vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracle and Cognos, have come up with various types of BI products. Today's BI solutions could be constituted with balanced scorecard, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), data warehousing, data mart, data mining, enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise information system (EIS), information visualization, and so on.

Function: Describe

This sentence concludes the introduction section by focussing on the current status of BI solutions, and also points the reader forwards to more detailed discussion of these in the following paragraphs.

Quality: Voice

The use of the term âdespiteâ creates tension between the two phrases in this sentence (we might expect usage of the term to have changed in several decades of useâ¦ but it has not). This is one way of giving more interest to what would otherwise be a set of factual statements.

Function: Analyse

This paragraph presents a sharp analysis and understanding of why the evolution in the 1990s took place. The referenced author could do something more positive than âclaimâ however (an over-used word in student writing). âConfirmsâ, âassertsâ, âpresents evidence thatâ would all demonstrate greater confidence that the reference does support the argument being made.

Quality: Authority

This is an effective use of reference which shows that the author gives appropriate significance to the information. Since this source was obtained electronically from the web, a page reference is not required.